The present disclosure relates generally to air traffic management, and more particularly to systems and methods of monitoring airborne objects.
Known air traffic management (ATM) systems attempt to monitor and control all flights in airspace to ensure safety, security, capacity, efficiency, and environmental goals are satisfied. Unfortunately, known ATM systems may have limited effectiveness in the presence of aging infrastructure, cyber threats (e.g., spoofing, jamming, malware, insider, and denial of service threats), and/or physical threats (e.g., unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or an unanticipated infrastructure loss). Moreover, known systems do not currently provide airlines opportunities to optimize fleet-wide performance during flights.
At least one known ATM system uses primary and secondary surveillance radar systems to monitor and track aircraft. However, current radar infrastructure is becoming outdated and it may be costly to operate and maintain. Moreover, many known radar systems have technical limitations, including poor performance in bad weather and lower altitudes, and most known systems are not expandable to meet predicted air traffic growth and other future aviation challenges and demands. For example, in many known systems, radar position resolution is not high enough to manage the predicted high densities and volumes of air traffic. Furthermore, radar information infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. For example, data feeds from radar may be corrupted by a malware or radar operation may be sabotaged by insiders misusing authorized access to radar control systems.
Other known ATM systems use a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) integrated with aircraft and ground infrastructures to monitor and track aircraft. Such ATM systems are predicted to be the primary means for airspace monitoring and aircraft tracking in the planned next-generation air transportation systems. At least some ATM systems use an Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) system for aircraft to automatically broadcast periodic messages containing the latest GNSS position and timing information. Ground stations receive the information and forward it to air traffic control systems. However, GNSS and ADS-B systems may have limited coverage issues due to reasons such as a lack of sufficient number of ground stations and satellites. Furthermore, GNSS is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, such as spoofing and jamming, which can mislead or deny positioning by aircraft-based GNSS receivers. ADS-B is also vulnerable to spoofing and jamming, since ADS-B messages are transmitted in plaintext and using well known network protocols. Verification of GNSS and known ADS-B messages would require additional, costly new ground and satellite systems, such as multilateration stations, alternate ground- or space-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) infrastructure, and legacy radar infrastructure.